Fracture Point

by T. D. Mandowsky

I watched her polish her nails. Damn, even that gives her the peace of mind that is so enviable. My ex, Adva, would have probably already gotten mad at me if I dared ask about her friends. I wish Donna would have been by my side in those days, smiling and calming, instead of disappointed Adva. Maybe I would be better now?

  I was waiting for her to finish putting the nail polish brush back in the glass bottle . . . and then I pounced on her, biting her on the shoulder and neck.

  She yelled at me that the nail polish hadn’t dried yet. I told her that I don’t care, she could continue to lie on her back with her hands in the air like a dead cockroach. I rolled up her pink robe and kissed her whole body while it was still hot from the shower. I kissed her navel and bit her waist. With my fingers, I could feel how wet she was. If I can’t please her properly, at least I’ll do whatever I can. Otherwise, who knows where she’ll go? Adva was generous in bed; I was stingy. Donna moaned when I licked her. She closed her hips on me. Her breathing increased and she grabbed my head and pushed me in deeper. It tasted hot and thick and salty, like the taste of sweat and blood. She sighed as though she were suffering, and the heat of blood began to drip from my chin.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I just checked. It’s not blood.”

  “Why would it be blood? I’m not PMS’ing,” she said.

  I told her it didn’t matter.

  “That’s it?” she asked as I got out of bed.

  “I have to study,” I said.

  “Did you find valedictorian aspirations between my legs? Come on. Don’t let him go down,” and when she said “him,” her hand went to my schlong.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I told her and went to the shower, leaving behind every man’s dream.

  Chapter 15

  The first three months in the new unit had been strange. I hadn’t handcuffed anyone or pulled my gun out even once. There were a few short pursuits during night arrests that ended with somebody in handcuffs, but they weren’t especially challenging. I only raised my voice a few times, when people we brought in for questioning thought that they were doing me a favor by answering. Besides that, the field patrols were similar to what I had done in the army. You go out, drive around, and come back. The conversations we conducted with the Palestinians we visited were mostly calm. We spoke to the neighborhood barber and the coffee shop owner.

  I knew some basic Arabic when I came here, thanks to Arabic lessons in high school and Dad’s conversations with his Halaby-Syrian mother. I’ve picked up a sentence here and there and tried to put things together; sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.

  There also was a third language that I needed to learn (or to ask Leroy about twice a day): ISA jargon. An “agent” isn’t actually a spy. The agents are operated by their agent handler, or “captain”, inside the enemy’s infrastructure. The agent would usually meet with his handler and they would talk for hours about life while eating and drinking together. It could take weeks or even months until the agent gives him critical information. One piece of information from the deep core of the enemy can be more useful to the state than thousands of soldiers. A “recruiting” process is when the captain tries to turn someone into an agent. In other words, the recruiter asks a stranger to lie to the whole world, except for him. The captain transfers all the information he receives to the desk analyst, who gathers the data and informs the captain about what his next step will be. Then they argue.

  I returned to the university as my second year of studies began. My daily routine was split between learning about international laws of sovereignty on campus, while at the same time at the ISA headquarters, I learned how terrorists smuggle communications equipment into the jails. I learned that there are actually pens that shoot. Amit showed us how a guard from the unit caught a tiny polymeric knife that was hidden in the elastic in the pants of an ex-prisoner, before a recruiting meeting with the captain. Every two weeks Amit tested us on the past two weeks.

  He built an exhibit in his office of “gifts” that handlers received from suspicious people in their operational area. In the past, these were paperweights with an eavesdropping device; today they are phone case covers with concealed chips that draw information from all the credit cards in the room.

  We watched the video of a meeting that that went wrong between Captain Yunas and an agent he handles. The agent was in the middle of a divorce, and a tense conversation quickly escalated into a physical threat. Little did the agent know that the meeting was supervised, and he was very surprised when a security guard broke into the meeting and handcuffed him. An hour later, at the end of the meeting, they kissed each other good-bye.

  Leroy especially enjoyed the costumes as we learned how to pick up agents. I liked the way I looked in a police uniform. Arik got into the cab, turned on the radio, and said to Bitton in his heavy South-African accent: “AG, pile in! I’ll take you wherever you want!”

  Amit told him to think up another cover.

  The Hebrew University didn’t care what I was doing besides studying. As far as they were concerned, I could have been James Bond or working as a waiter and it wouldn’t have made difference to them. The assignments kept coming. How am I supposed to get through exams at the end of the semester? What if there’s a significant escalation during finals?

  Studying at the Mount Scopus campus and working at the heart of the security center were two forces competing for my presence and time. One day I learned about the concept of “sovereignty” − and the next day I implemented it. One day I learned about the legal status of the West Bank − and that night I found myself on the roof of a building in Bethlehem, arresting a suspected terrorist. My political science studies taught me some theories about the conflict in the Middle East, but my work at the ISA taught me the practice of it.

  From one meeting with a secret agent and his operating captain, one can learn much more about politics and identity than in any introductory course at the university.

  Theory became practice, Hebrew became Arabic, and the mind turned to force. I went from squinting in concentration when reading an article, to squinting when aiming my gun. During the day I worked hard to get hold of summaries of the classes I missed, but at night . . . oh, the nights! At night, the searches had become obsessive. Sometimes four or five nights a week. The director of the ISA ran this pursuit operation himself.

  The pursuit was of Jonod Al-Takhrir, the cell that had taken captive a soldier who was serving in the ISA, and no one in the country knew.

  Chapter 16

  After Donna told me I remind her of a centaur, I bit her in the neck and from there everything quickly spiraled down into a bizarre pillow fight. It was not long before she surrendered, although I should mention one impressive kick she mistakenly gave my face.

  “You know how to fight,” I told her as the familiar ice bag froze my lip.

  “What you do in the gym, honey, is what we girls with curly hair do in front of the mirror every day,” she said as she pointed to her reflection, her hair disheveled once again. She let out a rare “Damn it!” and went to fix it.

  “Lucky for us that you won’t go on with this for much longer,” she hissed.

  A bitter smile came over her face. “Get up. You have to go to school.”

  My routine reminds me of a game of ping-pong with my head between the ISA and the university. Mix and match of undercover security patrols, lessons, exams, and night-time arrests. At first, nothing made sense to me and I operated automatically. They told me something; I did it. The handlers’ mouths turned out to be fountains of intelligence. Apparently the more they hide their secret lives from the world, the more they’re happy to share everything with everyone they’re allowed to. I never gave up on the opportunity to ask “why.” Sometimes I got something from conversations with spies, candidates for recruitment as agents, or just public figures who were forced to meet us unexpectedly. Someti
mes interesting information could be obtained just from small talk on the street.

  This is the way you get the feel of the street. There were actions out in the open, as well as covert actions in which we pretended to be policemen, or work for the prison service, or the army.

  Conversations in this part of the country were very loud; it was a matter of cultural differences. One can’t show weakness, so that’s the way to do business here. Sometimes the captain and his agent exchanged secrets in whispers. When this happened, I tried to overcome the language barrier. When a certain word was repeated, I would try to remember it and afterwards ask the captain what it meant.

  Mondays were a far cry from the days before. Mount Scopus Campus, courses on human rights and international law. At noon I would meet Leroy at a restaurant close to the Faculty of Law. “What’s the rush?” I asked him the last time we sat there. He finished two-thirds of his pita when I had only just finished adding tahini and amba to mine.

  “If you want to do well at university,” he said with his mouth full, “you need to make the most of your breaks,” he said, and banged his fist on the table.

  “Are you crazy? During the break I rest. My brain can’t work at this intensity.”

  “No,” he said and swallowed. “I’m not talking about studying.”

  “Explain,” I said.

  “It’s like in intelligence. It’s all about people,” Leroy explained. “These breaks are your time to become friends with the guy who writes the test, with the assistant professor who gives you your grade, with the professor who will accept you to M.A. studies. Otherwise . . .” He had to stop for a minute to swallow but he gestured with his arm, “otherwise you’ll get screwed in the finals.”

  “An M.A.? What are you talking about? I remind you that you are 25 years old and are going to Hebron tonight to make an arrest.”

  “That’s exactly why!” He refused to stop swallowing. “If you’re only graded according to the way you study, you’ll have no chance.”

  Leroy finished his shawarma and wiped his hands on a napkin.

  “Where are you going?” I asked him.

  “To see Prof. Shechtman. You may remember him from the Shechtman petition to the Supreme Court. He petitioned on behalf of the Human Rights Association against the ISA interrogations. He won. Since then, all of our interrogations are according to the Shechtman Act.”

  “What do you want from him?” I asked, as he stood up to leave.

  “I want to ask him an unimportant question, and after that I’ll ask how his wife is doing after coming back from the Seychelles. If I keep it up, next year I’ll be writing my thesis with him as my advisor.”

  After seeing him beat the crap out of people in the ring, I was having a hard time picturing Leroy as a human rights lawyer.

  “How can you live this double life?” Donna asked me later that night during the half hour I had at home before I had to head back to headquarters for a night shift.

  “You run on rooftops in Ramallah, and after three hours of sleep you’re taking an exam at the university − and then you go back to the base for another night. It’s madness.”

  “You’re no different,” I answered. “You study for that test of yours on neurons, then you sleep for three hours, get up to take the test, and in the afternoon go to work at the sushi restaurant. Believe me, I would rather run after terrorists any day of the week.”

  Walking out of the apartment, she pulled my arm and closed the door I had just opened. I had forgotten to give her a hug before leaving.

  “Sorry,” I said, and we hugged.

  “What’s bothering you?” she asked me.

  If she had even known about Seffi, I would tell her that I dreamed last night that I found his dead body, and then Amit sent me to his parents to inform them that their son is dead.

  “Just remember what’s most important,” Donna said as she lay her head on me and caressed my back from the neck down to my gun.

  “So are we going out tomorrow night? Just the two of us and a bottle of wine?” she asked, and pressed her waist against mine. I really wanted this, even though I was afraid of what would happen afterwards.

  Chapter 17

  My cousin Libby is two years older than me. When we were children, my aunt and uncle lived near us in Afula. She was like a big sister to me, or, should I say, more like a big brother. Even her parents were surprised the day she came home from school with a nasty cut after getting into a fight with Ari Fadida, the son of a bitch who spat at me during recess. Just like an older brother, she offered me a glimpse of what the future would be like. In junior high, I went to bed when she went out. In high school, she had her boyfriend over for Friday night dinner with the family at our house, and then she would go back to her house with him.

  When I was in 12th grade, she worked as a welfare officer during her compulsory military service. My father and I would join her parents and visit her at the base on Saturdays. We’d sit together at the gas station outside the base. She’d have a black coffee with no sugar and a large burekas. My father would order a latte and a croissant. I loved hearing about her military experiences, as if she were returning from a commando operation in an enemy state. After my army service, I bought a plane ticket to South America because that was what Libby did. I told everyone it was because she gave me a lot of information on the trip, but to be honest, it was because everything she did was, in my eyes, always the coolest.

  She got engaged when she was 23, when she enrolled as a psychology major at Hebrew University. He was a guy with whom she fell madly in love. He, however, insisted on studying in Tel Aviv. In the end, he called off the engagement at the last minute and broke her heart. When I started my B.A. in political science, she was starting her M.A. in clinical psychology. She chose this because she has a heart of gold. Her problem is that she’s always drawn to people who need a lifetime of therapy. She was going out with guys who took so much from her and gave nothing back (a bit like me). That’s just the way Libby is. She builds herself by building others.

  As children, our families, lived next to each other. She was the oldest child of my maternal uncle. Her only brother, Hanan, was born mentally disabled. When he had an episode, Libby would escape to her room and listen to music on her earphones, or come over to my house to play soccer in the living room. Taking care of Hanan depleted every drop of her parents’ energy and, as a result, Libby was left on her own, often sitting and contemplating the world − alone. She was her own psychologist years before the discipline became her studies. As a kid, all I had on my shelf were a few hand-held video games with weak batteries that I didn’t have the energy to change.

  On Libby’s shelf there were books she borrowed from the library: Spinoza, Fromm, Freud, and Foucault. Sometimes I would open one of them to a random page and try to read a sentence that I didn’t understand. But Libby understood them. She would explain the complex sentences to me in simple words. Libby was the smartest and most modest person I knew. Beneath her black hair was a brain full of information and opinions that she would never show off by saying things like, “I read in an article that . . .” or “It’s funny you would say that, because Viktor Frankl wrote . . .” She always had something smart to say that was original, either the synthesis of a few things she’d read or learned at university, or a sharp, independent opinion that echoes in your head days later.

  During family dinners she was usually quiet and listened. I got to hear her intellectual insights later on, alone on the balcony, while smoking a hookah. After the main course, she would catch my eye, turn her head to the side, as if saying, “Should we go?” and we’d go sit on the balcony. She’d prepare the hookah tobacco as quickly as a Bedouin nomad in the Sinai Desert. She only smoked when she had guests or when she was sad. She preferred it to comfort food − at least, that’s what she told me once when we talked about her weight. This was the only topic she wou
ld ask for advice about, instead of giving it.

  “How do you live with this duality?” Libby asked me the day after Donna had asked me the same question. We met at my aunt and uncle’s house in Afula and, unlike Donna, she demanded an answer. The smoke from the hookah filled her parents’ balcony. I told her that in the morning I study military history, and at night I put on my uniform and go on operations to arrest wanted terrorists.

  “Okay, so you told me what you do,” she said, letting out a cloud of smoke and passing the pipe to me. “But I didn’t hear how you live with what you do.”

  “I live well,” I answered. It’s a good thing she didn’t ask me how Donna lives with it. It’s not easy living with a centaur.

  “What did you say the name of the course you did at the ISA is?” she said, giving me a serious look. The wrinkle between her eyebrows was larger than I recalled.

  “It’s called the Unified Security Course.”

  “Don’t you see the irony?”

  “What?”

  “The course that is splitting up your life is called ‘unified.’”

  “It’s like psychos studying psychology.”

  “Aren’t you sick of being involved with this endless occupation?” she continued.

  “Like you, I also thought I knew everything about the conflict,” I said, and took the hookah pipe that she had been hogging. “The cliché is true: the more you know, the less you understand.”

  Half a year of field work for the ISA taught me what years at university could not. The more I learned, the more confused I became. Doubt undermined any conclusion I reached. The knowledge that I gained distanced certainty from me. The course in evolution blew my mind. How could this have happened without divine intervention? At the same time, the course on genocide contradicted this and convinced me that God was not interested in insignificant matters like humans. As I acquired more knowledge, I realized that no one would be able to convince me whether there was a director for this play we’re in. I passed the pipe back to her.